Quotes from book

And the Mountains Echoed

“A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.”

“I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.”

“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.”

“For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.”

“Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.”

“You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.”

“Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and right doing,
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.”

“J’aurais dû être plus gentille—I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.”

“People in the countryside carry a sense of dignity. They wear it, don't they? Like a badge? I'm being genuine.”

“But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you.”